Extra History Suggestion Survey is OPEN to 12/14
Added 2021-12-05 06:30:00 +0000 UTCOur theme for November & December is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds!
In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay published one of the landmark works of early social psychology: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Covering everything from witch hunts to economic bubbles, the Crusades to haunted houses, popular paranoias over "slow poisoning" or veneration of relics, it tried explain why large groups of people behaved in ways that were (in his Mackay's view) irrational.
So for the 180th anniversary of the book, give us your witch hunts, your dancing plagues, your weird urban panics. Want to hear about the leaping devil Spring-Heeled Jack, or the popular hysteria surrounding his predecessor the London Monster, who was said to prick women with a needle? What about the "Tulip Mania," a 1637 financial bubble in which contract prices for the newly-introduced flower soared to unheard-of levels before crashing, leaving investors with nothing?
Or would you like to go more serious, studying new religious movements such as the Spiritualists, or the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (the "Boxers" of the Boxer Rebellion)? What about the phenomenon of the Ghost Dance, a ritual that swept Native American tribes in 1890, with the goal of ending the United States' westward expansion, and indirectly led to the Wounded Knee Massacre? We can even do the life of a spiritual leader—we'll take any topic provided it hinges on and explores human belief.
Some notes about suggestions:
- If a suggestion we encounter only has enough research material/production scope for a one-off episode instead of a full series, we file it in a separate list to reference later when we are planning to schedule a one-off episode between series (this is true for every survey we do).
- Only one suggestion per person please! Multiple suggestions from the same person during any given survey period will be manually removed.
Comments
Also forgot to mention in the submission -- this negative reaction plays a prominent role in one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.
Brian Rose
2021-12-11 06:48:36 +0000 UTC""It is the duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." Republican Platform, 1856. In the same sentence in which the Republican Party declared themselves to be anti-slavery, they declared themselves equally morally opposed to another (peculiarly American) social practice. To a certain extent, this story corresponds with the early history of the Church of Latter Day Saints; but it is also the story of how non-mormons responded to the emergence of this new religion, and how a particular, what some would call a "moral panic", took hold, and changed the course of a nation's history.
Brian Rose
2021-12-11 06:45:37 +0000 UTCMy submission: Mormonism and Anti-Mormonism
Brian Rose
2021-12-11 06:45:19 +0000 UTCIt's a real pity about the dating restrictions for this theme in particular, since the very first things I thought of was the various moral panics of the mid to late 20th Century -- "the Devil's music" (which is almost always white reactionaries reacting to the latest music of Black America being popularized); panic over "juvenile delinquents" in the 1950's (predating the later crime wave); the Satanist Panic, and panic over Dungeon's and Dragons; the missing children panic, which later became the Child Sex Trafficking Panic, which later became QAnon... actually, a lot of this seems like the older generation just generally freaking out about the younger generation, and fear about keeping them "under control" or "safe".
Brian Rose
2021-12-11 06:25:36 +0000 UTCI was thinking of The Dancing Plague myself, but am holding off as I also wonder if it can sustain more than a couple episodes.
Brian Rose
2021-12-11 06:15:40 +0000 UTCThe Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Note to the researchers: For this subject I would recommend William Reddy's The Navigation of Feeling.
Clare McDermet
2021-12-05 21:11:12 +0000 UTCI’d like a more abstract series that links a few things together. My suggestion was messianic movements in desperate times. They have so many things in common, I bet it would be interesting to see how they link together.
Benjamin Fouty
2021-12-05 19:30:10 +0000 UTCIt would be interesting to look at the Florida Boom of the first quarter of the 20th century. as in there was so much development, both phony and real, it was a bubble that may have been a building block to 1929. On the genuine development side, so much housing was made in Florida since it was expected to sell right away, it supposedly could have housed the entire southern U.S. on the scammer phony side, someone would sell a plot of land with a "house" on it, and when someone would arrive from as far away as New York, it's just a movie cut-out that was a piece of plywood.
Zac
2021-12-05 18:54:45 +0000 UTCI want to see the Salem Witch Trials or the Dancing Plague, although the dancing plague doesn't have that much research.
Peanut Tree5000
2021-12-05 11:10:14 +0000 UTC
